Big Finish Productions Night Thoughts

Written by	Edward Young
Format	Compact Disc
Released	2006
Continuity	After Survival

Starring Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred and Philip Olivier

Synopsis: A remote Scottish mansion. Five bickering academics are haunted by ghosts from their past. Reluctantly they offer shelter to the Doctor and his companions Ace and Hex. Hex, already troubled by a vivid nightmare, is further disturbed by the nighttime appearance of a whistling, hooded apparition. Ace tries to befriend the young housemaid, Sue. Sue knows secrets. She knows why the academics have assembled here, and she knows why they are all so afraid. But Sue's lips are sealed, preferring to communicate through her disturbing toy, Happy the Rabbit. And then the killing begins.

• Sleep Tight... by Mekel Rogers
• Scary shit! by Joe Ford
• "Terrible Things, Night Thoughts" by Hugh Sturgess
• A Review by Brian May
• Requiem for a Dream by Jacob Licklider

Sleep Tight... by Mekel Rogers 30/4/06

The haunted house angle has been done before. So has the isolated think tank of scientists gone wrong. Night Thoughts, however, combines the two in a story that is wonderfully chilling and entertaining. The time twist in the middle is a nice touch as well.

The TARDIS trio comes off wonderfully here. Hex is a fantastic addition to the Sylvester/Sophie duo as he gives the Doctor someone to teach and Ace someone to flirt with. The playful teasing between Ace and Hex throughout the story is really cute and adds some much needed light moments to an otherwise serious story.

Sylvester McCoy does a great job playing against the scientists in the think tank, delivering such great lines as: "The greatest asset in fishing is caution, especially if you're a fish" and "The human race seems to have perfected everything, except itself."

Good stuff.

The story while good, is not perfect, as episode four contains rather wordy explanations about why things happened the way they did, some of which are a bit far-fetched. Additionally, while most of the terror is conveyed in a suspenseful way (to the story's benefit), there are one or two rather graphic scenes that to me were a bit much, but then I'm rather easily disturbed by such things. The only scene that I thought was over the line was the final one which was needlessly graphic and can actually be deleted without losing the end of the story (as the previous scene sees the departure of the Doctor and company).

The final scene not withstanding, I enjoyed this adventure very much. Night Thoughts is a great way to get spooked, and this TARDIS trio is rapidly becoming my favorite mix of characters.

Bottom Line: I'm going to have trouble sleeping after this one!

Scary shit! by Joe Ford 6/5/06

Truly, truly excellent and the sort of excellent we haven't seen in a long while. The fact that it happens to be a seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex story merely makes the taste of success even sweeter. It probably requires a second listen once you have all the important information to see how cleverly it is all put together, but even on a first listen it is clear how well-written, well-directed and well-performed this is. What's more it's also the scariest thing Big Finish have offered up since The Chimes of Midnight and (for the sheer amount of scenes that made me shiver) it probably even tops that.

It pleases me so much that the Doctor, Ace and Hex get to be involved in a story that isn't impenetrable (Dreamtime), that doesn't split them up throughout (Live 34) and actually starts to exploit the relationships between them. It is easily Philip Olivier's best story since The Harvest and the only one which allows us to see how likable and useful Hex can be. Whilst his medical knowledge is a bonus (given people are dropping like flies in this story!), it is his compassion (especially in a very sweet scene with Sue where he talks about the mother he never knew and gives her her first hug) and his muscle (punching out Major Dickens) that marks him out as particularly useful. It is also helps that he is no longer being treated as the new boy and that he has stopped saying, "Oh my God!" ad nauseum. Olivier is not the sort of actor you would expect to find in Doctor Who (given he comes across as pretty hip and gorgeous) and at first it would seem that his very up-to-date character was completely out of place in Doctor Who, particularly these troubled times of Big Finish, but I am fully prepared to admit how wrong I was and can see now how his inclusion is not only pretty brave but gives the McCoy stories (easily the weakest of the bunch usually) something of a twinkle. What's more, he is perfectly surprising in spots, especially now he is called upon to do more than soap acting it is amazing to see how far his ability extends.

Ace is still the weak spot and Sophie Aldred continues to overdo it in places but in stories like Night Thoughts where she is underwritten and given more to do than explode emotionally and blow things up, she can be quite a treat. Certainly she gets knocked about a bit here, more than she is used to, and it is quite fun to see Hex rib her for it, considering how she acts like a seasoned time travel veteran, ready for anything. The biggest trouble with Ace which no matter how good the story is Big Finish will never be able to rectify is that Ace is clearly (more so than Nyssa and Turlough and Peri who they also use) a character bourne out of the eighties and add to that this is her one millionth appearance in a Doctor Who story (slight exaggeration but not much!). She comes across as outdated.

Sylvester McCoy, on the other hand, just cannot act. Or rather he can act in brief moments where he's not really trying to act (I'm not kidding you! Its when the seventh Doctor sounds bored or disinterested and tired that work the best, because there he is acting as I always imagined he should... above everyone else, aware of everybody's part and just going through the motions of his pre-arranged plans), but when he is putting effort into the role he comes across as tongue twistingly incomprehensible and worse, unbelievable. I don't mean to be cruel, but he just does not make the dialogue sound convincing; no matter what interesting things they are doing with his character it is the performance that counts. There are more than a few hints of his darker Doctor here, especially when he has to go back in time ask for a child to be killed, that push the boundaries in a very pleasing way. The fact that the villain is going around using a recording of his voice before he attacks people is creepy in itself but the way the Doctor seems to know what is happening without having a clue who any of the players are before they arrive terrifies me; he always seems to be holding back on explanations, letting his friends work it out for themselves. A complex character, if not entirely satisfying.

However, despite their flaws together they make a highly engaging team. Hex brings out the teacher in the Doctor and the more mature Ace and there is clearly a great deal of affection between them which makes scenes like Hex's concern for Ace when she is wandering through a garden full of animal traps genuinely tense.

The direction is brilliant, Gary Russell might have his off days but the last few releases he has dealt with have been excellent, as though he has remembered how special Doctor Who is and how quality it should always be. I point out the direction especially because many scenes in Night Thoughts are designed to scare and it doesn't matter how well-written they are, unless the director gets the atmosphere right it is for nothing. The attacks in Night Thoughts are terrifying and the timing is always perfect. Take the scene where the Deacon discovers something has been going on behind her back... her panic rises, her screams get louder and then falls silent and we hear... ghastly breathing heading towards her. It's terrifyingly good and one of many frightening treats (the end of episode one is fab, Hex alone in a deathly silent night time kitchen and ripe for somebody with a tape recording of the Doctor's voice to attack him).

The scary moments are all very well but the story is never short of drama either or clever ideas to back it up. The backstory of Idee's death is heartbreaking and the catalyst for some nasty experiments in time travel. How this involves all of the guest characters is brilliantly written as we get to see the effects of their crimes before the cause is slowly revealed via each death. This leads to a stunning final episode where we realise the insane ambitions of one character have serious ramifications for the remaining characters, especially the Doctor, who has to choose between life and death for one character. Throughout all this we have Sue, the very disturbed little girl who, along with her toy rabbit Happy, have their own story to tell. Surprisingly Sue turns out to be less involved in the plot than I would have thought but who cares, any scene with Happy the Rabbit is great. What a frightening creation and what a voice! Wait until you hear the last scene... I guarantee you will be squirming with delight!

The acting is strong across the board and the only real complaint I have is out of all of the suspects it really isn't difficult to figure who the baddie will turn out to be. But there are some lovely moments dotted about; the Bursar's frightened acknowledgement that she has been held prisoner for ten years (Joanna McCullum), the Deacon's discovery of her own suicide note (Ann Beach) and Sue's quiet admission that she has never had a hug (Lizzie Hopley). Another strong ensemble cast in the Other Lives' vein where a particular combination of actors genuinely enhance the strength of a good script. As ever the production work is good, although I feel I should compliment Gareth Jenkins at ERS for the highly atmospheric music, working all the better because it is very subtle in places and the director has chosen the perfect spots (when characters are being approached by the monster) for there to be no music at all.

There's not really much more I can say about Night Thoughts except head out a buy it now. It's the first Big Finish story I can wholeheartedly recommend in about two years, where both style and substance are equally good and the overall experience might just change the way you look at Doctor Who in general, especially its ability to scare you silly. Although may I make one further recommendation first, switch all the lights off, wait until you are alone and then listen to this story. You won't regret it, I promise you...

"Terrible Things, Night Thoughts" by Hugh Sturgess 5/3/12

It is an amazing fact that Edward Young managed to write the script to Night Thoughts fifteen years before it was finally performed, pass it by Andrew Cartmel and then into the hands of Gary Russell, and then have it read by about ten actors - and it wasn't until they were performing it that someone said "hang on, where's the ending?" Having checked and discovered that the script did indeed end without warning shortly before the end of part two, director Gary Russell told the cast to make up any old random ending, so long as it wasn't very good (in line with Big Finish editorial policy). This is the remarkable true story of how Night Thoughts was born.

Not to put too fine a point on it, what the hell is this? A slasher-style story which forgets about its slasher, a character piece in which irritating non-characters say annoying things and then die at the hands of a threat with the personality of a pet rock, a thriller with a plot that stops making sense at about the end of episode two and begins to be produced ad lib from then on... all are accurate descriptions of this story. Andrew Cartmel, the man who oversaw Remembrance of the Daleks, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Ghost Light, Survival and so on, "would recommend this script to anyone". Presumably, he meant "recommend to any script-editor as having lots of potential". He probably couldn't imagine a producer who didn't think that the script would only be adequate after being completely rewritten. He had never conceived of Gary Russell.

Honestly, in no way is this a finished script. If Night Thoughts had been made for television, it would not be of broadcast standard. Young fails to demonstrate the slightest discipline in his story. Characters change their motivations between scenes. Their memories change too, and not in a deliberate, Blair Witch 2 way either. Plot threads are picked up and dropped without explanation. The only way the non-story as it exists can work is through 100% idiot plotting. Most astonishingly of all, it manages to make the greatest mistake a horror story can and makes its villain less threatening than an old lady in a tea shop. It teases us with a monstrous zombie revived by pure hatred, but the actual villain is so underwhelming that it's a surprise when his defeat is presented as the climax. It has ambitions beyond the usual mindless tits-and-gore of the slasher genre, but that doesn't get it any extra points because it's a Doctor Who story and I expect a bit more than mindless tits-and-gore to begin with.

I've searched around, but I've failed to find a review of this story anywhere near as negative as mine will be. So many people gave this shit twelve out of ten that you'd think it contained proof of the existence of the soul. Is my brain not working? Are the hidden depths of this story some kind of blind spot for me? Was there a mix-up at the factory, and I received a CD of the cast mucking around for 150 minutes? This is hideous. It makes me too appalled to speak. The fact that so many other people gave it good-to-middling reviews testifies to the infinite capacity for variation in human taste.

I don't know who to blame for this abysmal mess of a story. Whoever it was: you suck. We might blame Edward Young, who wrote this in 1989 and should - surely - have reread when he got it out of the attic and thought he might make a buck off Big Finish. Did he notice how it didn't make sense? Hmm, perhaps it would be churlish to insult a man who can't even write two consecutive scenes that fit together, let alone an entire audioplay. What about Gary Russell? The gratuitous and irrelevant reference to Kathleen Dudman clings to your ear-canals like bukkake footage to the eyes, which sounds like a lot of Russell's work. After so many years at the head of Big Finish, did he think for a moment about the plot of Night Thoughts? By the look of it, no. Don't believe me? Well, here are a few... well, we can hardly call them "plot" holes, can we?

Spoilers, by the way, if anyone cares...

1. During the operation on Eadie, Mr. Hartley refuses to take part because he's "Not qualified. She'd die." We later learn that the operation was intended to euthanise her. One need not be Einstein to see a flaw here.
2. The Doctor and Hex feel a "psychic distress call" at the beginning of the story. This is never explained or mentioned again.
3. Towards the end of episode two, O'Neill tells Hex that Hartley set a lot of bear-traps that can be activated from inside the house. Beyond the obvious safety nightmare this presents, by the beginning of episode three Hex remembers Major Dickens, and not O'Neill, telling him about the traps. Even more strangely, Hex now thinks that the traps are the Major's, not Hartley's. So, umm, who's right? Then O'Neill is sent out to navigate his way through the traps, even though only the Major knows where they all are. Hex points this problem out, but in the script-writing trade this is called "you can't fire me, I quit", as the author tries to point out the flaw before the audience can, in a gormless attempt to neutralise it.
4. More memory trouble: Ace is pleased to hear the reason for why some books in the Bursar's room haven't been read, even though she hasn't seen them. Later on, Ace clairvoyantly learns that Hartley died after he was pushed down the stairs and not by a heart attack at all, even though no one's mentioned this before.
5. And yet more: the Doctor forgets Happy the Rabbit between scenes.
6. The Major locks all the doors and windows for safety. Upon learning this, Ace and Sue immediately decide to climb out the window. It is never explained how they make this decision.
7. Having learned that Ace and Sue have broken out of the window, Hex enthusiastically informs the Major: "You're finished!" Sorry? What? When did the Major become the villain? Admittedly, he puts on his best Evil Mark Gatiss voice and says, "How humourously yet stupidly pointless!", but so far all he's done is lock the house up. For safety. Hex believes that Ace and Sue are going to "get help". On a deserted island. What precisely are they going to tell the police when (and if) they find them?
8. The farce in the woods. Hex can hear everything Ace says, except when she's saying "where are you?". Ace can never hear what Hex says, especially when it's something like "don't move". Hex somehow gets to the chapel without bumping into Ace on the way. Later, when he thinks she's been caught in the trap, he goes back to the house (through the trap) to get some torches, but for some reason sends O'Neill to look for her (in the trap) instead, but O'Neill himself ends up back at the chapel (having gone through the trap). The Doctor finds Ace (trapped in the trap), goes to the chapel (through the trap), goes back to Ace (through the trap) and rescues her. They both go back to the chapel (through the trap). No one apart from Ace gets caught in, sees or even seems to be terribly worried by the trap. The trap thus disappears from the story and never returns. This is sort of the anti-matter opposite of Chekov's Gun: something that is clearly set up early in the story and the audience eagerly anticipates its pay-off, but it is never used.
9. At the very end, the Doctor remembers that Ace said that someone steered her away from the bear traps. Umm... no, she didn't. And no one did, otherwise we wouldn't have had the episode two cliffhanger. Where the hell does this line come from? That's also in the scene which asks us to believe that Zombie-Eadie found her mother's discarded hoodie beside the lake... ten years after her mother drowned herself there. That's one hell of a hoodie. Did Young forget the timescale of his own story?
10. Despite having kept the Bursar and Hartley prisoner on Gravonax Isle, the Major for some reason put an ad in the paper inviting "fellow academics" to the island to stay and study, which O'Neill accepted. It's later revealed that O'Neill had an ulterior motive in coming to the island... but that doesn't explain why the Major put the ad there in the first place. That's like taking out an ad announcing that he's broken the law.
11. Hex, O'Neill and Sue go off to dig up Eadie's grave. When they reach the grave, Hex has vanished, and suddenly the Major knows where O'Neill and Sue are and seems to have an offstage Hex at his mercy... somehow. That's my reading of his lines, anyway. Hex reappears halfway through episode four, perfectly at liberty, frees Ace and stops the Major. What the fuck is going on?
12. Zombie-Eadie is out and about. To protect Ace and the Bursar, the Doctor locks them in the cellar and bolts the door from the outside. So they can't get out. But someone on the outside (like, say, Eadie) can get in.
13. The Bursar gets telepathically updated on the plot. She believes that the Major buried Eadie near the chapel but somehow learns while she's unconscious that this isn't true and guesses that her body is in the stuffed bear, but how she does this isn't explained.
14. And then the doozy: what was the Major's plan? In episode three, he says that he wants to rewrite history so that Eadie was never killed. He's therefore surprised when the experiment succeeds and yet history doesn't change. When the Doctor explains a frankly berserk version of temporal physics (Eadie's skeleton will twitch because time can't work out whether she's dead or alive?), the Major says "I see" and reveals that he embalmed Eadie just in case he learnt such a counter-intuitive thing. Strange already, but then he says that O'Neill and Sue will hear Eadie crying out from inside her coffin. Sue opens the coffin and SCREAMS!!! Next episode and it's revealed that she screamed at the surprise of finding the coffin empty (as you do) and the Major tells the Doctor that he was only joking about the coffin bit (for whatever inexplicable reason). Between episodes, the Major's plan has changed into a genuinely loopy megalomaniacal scheme to become Frankenstein and resurrect the dead. It's clear that at least Hartley was aware that Eadie's murder was part of a time experiment, and yet when they hear the Major's message from the future even Hartley gormlessly asks what's going on.
15. This story involves time-travel. In episode four, the Doctor goes back in time to make sure history runs on track. He does this by introducing himself to the guest cast, ten years before he "originally" met them. This alteration to history (bursting in, introducing himself and showing the Deacon her own suicide note) still stands, apparently, at the end of the story. So what, exactly, happened? How did those changes affect the story up to that point? The Bursar, the Deacon, Hartley, etc. should have revived Eadie, abandoned the Major and left the island. Even if the Major still managed to force them to do what he wanted, they should have all recognised the Doctor when he arrived later and the entire "plot" should have changed. That's not clever, that's A Christmas Carol (the episode, not the famous Dickens work). Going from this story's view of temporal physics, the Doctor goes back in time in the TARDIS to make sure that history runs its course, because a TARDIS can change history better than the Transactor. He's there to witness the events in motion, and ultimately assists in changing them. So the whole Zombie-Eadie plot shouldn't have happened. History should be altered so that the guest cast met the Doctor ten years before the story is set, Eadie and Maude never died, Sue/Ruth was never taken into foster care and the Major never ran around threatening people. I'm going from this story's own rules. I don't mind the idea of time itself creating Zombie-Eadie, it makes aesthetic sense. The resolution doesn't. Basically, the Doctor twists history one way, decides he doesn't like it and twists it back again. All without any consequences.

No thought has been put into this story. Edward Young seems unable to stop re-writing the story and giving it a new plot mid-scene. The resolution to the episode three cliffhanger is possibly the biggest cheat in Doctor Who history. (A big call.) Why does the Major tell the Doctor that Eadie is in the coffin when she isn't? He admits he's lying within subjective seconds, so what did this achieve? How could he have known that Eadie's corpse would lurch back into a monstrous parody of life in the present, when that a) doesn't make sense, b) isn't what modern science suggests and c) isn't what he's just said he believes will happen? The Major's obviously mad (the Doctor says so at the end, in a massive authorial hand-wave), but it's pure laziness to pin the blame for the Major's constantly changed plans on his lunacy. Why did he do all this? The Doctor explains: "he was an extremely evil and callous individual." Bad things are done by wicked people, well that explains everything.

Not to mention that he makes a spectacularly flimsy villain. Zombie-Eadie has been menacing various characters throughout the story, and has (sort of) killed Hartley and the Deacon. The Major forgets all about the murders and the story promotes him to the position of antagonist without warning. He suddenly becomes one of those cackling megalomaniacs with the laugh-that-begins-with-N, bullying and threatening his way into getting what he wants, but how? There's no hint that he has a weapon, and can't exactly overpower Ace and the Doctor and strap bear-traps to their legs singlehandedly, particularly with the wandering Hex to deal with too. So why do the Doctor and Ace, of all people, put up with him, a man whose ambition is to be let back into the army? That's his Evil Plan. Is Young honestly asking us to believe that the seventh Doctor, who fights with gods and demons every other day, is going to be even remotely inconvenienced by this loser? Imagine what the tenth Doctor would do. He'd laugh, piss on him and run away. I think even Torchwood might have been able to handle him without too much difficulty, and they'd have problems helping old ladies across the road.

The script also makes the story-killing mistake of making its "slasher" impotent. Zombie-Eadie is never threatening. She "kills" Hartley by giving him a heart-attack (or by pushing him down the stairs, depending on which side of the absolutely shithouse editing we currently are), forces the Deacon to kill herself, bungles her poisoning of Ace and the Bursar (who promptly forgets about the near-fatal attack) and, in the "terrifying" episode one cliffhanger, locks Hex in the kitchen, plays a recording of the Doctor's voice, whistles a bit and then lets him out again. She doesn't do anything else until the very, very end, when she pushes a stuffed bear over on an old lady and then kills the Major after everyone else has left. Right. Not exactly Michael Myers, is she? I liked Eadie at the beginning, whistling her way around the place with a dodgy tape-recording of the Doctor's voice (a bit like The Empty Child, really), and her one and only piece of dialogue is nicely macabre (and marks possibly the first time in Doctor Who that the evil genius behind things is a stuffed toy), but, in context, it's just another inexplicable, unplanned and totally unconnected moment of randomness in a story where basically only the actors have remained the same throughout.

As you can probably tell, I hated this story and I haven't even got onto the actors. Episode one, on rare occasions, becomes an effective mood piece, but the rest is marred by pretentious dialogue and terrible acting. Sylvester McCoy is dire, truly awful. I don't know whether this is usual for his Big Finish stories but it's worse than any of his performances on screen by a power of ten. As in, he goes from positive to negative on the scale of goodness. Dear God. What the hell is he doing when he decides to scare everyone with nonsense? "The tears of a child, the greatest water-power known to man... remember that!" and some grisly story about a bear (see what I did there?). Admittedly, this is the script's fault. Aha! I can blame Edward Young again. Hartley charitably tells Ace that the Doctor "seems intelligent... and wise", when he's been spouting utter cackpole ever since he arrived. He redeems himself later when he goes back in time to convince a group of scientists to murder a healthy young girl. In the main, though, McCoy was almost certainly on drugs for this story and I can't say I blame him.

Sophie Aldred and Philip Olivier are better, but Aldred at least has to cope with 24-carat enforced stupidity all the way through, most notably when Hex tells her that someone in a hoodie has used the Bursar's stairlift: she accepts that the stairlift has been used, but dismisses the obvious whistling as the wind and goes back to bed. Later, Sue says some seriously creepy things that see her shoot up in the story's list of suspects and yet Ace doesn't think to tell the Doctor.

The guest cast are worse. There are only two actors worth a damn in this story. One of them is Hartley and he's dead before the first cliffhanger. The Major is so blustery and angry that he's just a caricature from the start and when we're expected to take him seriously it beggars belief. The Deacon starts out irritating ("Hurricanes Adam to Zachariah are brewing up for a Biblical storm!"... hmm, could she be religious?) and graduates to "too annoying to live" before the end of episode one. Needless to say, I was glad when she was horribly murdered. She suffers from the handicap of having a comedy Scottish accent, but her risible delivery of "my gals in the rambling society would be proud o' me!" was uncalled for.

Only O'Neill seems like a real person, to begin with at least, despite the idiot plotting. He's perfectly fine when he's an ordinary man in ordinary circumstances, but beyond that he loses it. He also has to deal with the line "I am your father". It would take a much better actor than Andrew Forbes to pull that horror off, and later he attempts to deadpan a line about exhuming the ten-year-old corpse of his eldest daughter. This man's family has been destroyed, for God's sake. He just sounds mildly flustered. The Bursar is better, but still suffers from the portentous dialogue. We're supposedly to believe these people killed someone and have been consumed with guilt ever since? Give me a break.

What destroys this story is an atrocious combination of two factors: a bad script and crap acting. A good production can cover a multitude of sins, and a good script ruined by its execution can summon admiration and pity. Here, everything Edward Young doesn't ruin, the actors do. The acting is terrible and the script barely qualifies as a narrative. In many ways, the script is the dark, horror-flick version of A Christmas Carol: random shit happens for the duration with the barest excuse for a plot, and eventually the story ends. What makes this different to the Steven Moffat Christmas episode is that the latter is a high-class production filled with very good acting and sumptuous production values.

The people who made this story are either morons or believe that the audience are. I took no pleasure in listening to this abysmal creation, but I managed to extract a certain degree of bloodthirsty satisfaction in skewering it to the limits of my vocabulary. Maybe after several re-drafts and recasting, this might have become a gruesome little horror story with time-travel in the mix, as there's a ton of potential. For God's sake, if you have a gruesome zombie killer, USE her rather than jettison her from the plot before the halfway mark. If there's a field filled with bear-traps, USE the damn things. Imagine Ace, fleeing from Zombie-Eadie through the dark forest, stumbling into the trap and becoming caught in it. Bleeding, in immense pain and unable to move, she hears the gruesome breathing of Eadie coming closer and closer... That would have been awesome. I like the concept of Doctor Who Knows What You Did Last Summer, but this is neither a good horror story nor a good mystery. As it stands, Night Thoughts is a story without a noticeable trace of material that makes it worth your money.

Wretched.

A Review by Brian May 27/4/14

Night Thoughts is yet another Big Finish tale set in that most cliched of locations, the isolated house. It's a mix of suspense, horror and murder mystery that veers off in a strange direction in the final episode, not unlike its predecessors, The Chimes of Midnight and Master. It was written in the late 1980s and intended for the original televised series but, due to its cancellation in 1989, this was not to be. Listening with this in mind, you can detect the Season 26 parallels, in particular a stylistic and thematic similarity to Ghost Light, but also a reflection of the overall dark mood that typified Andrew Cartmel's later years.

It mixes that period's atmosphere with the more explicit fare we've come to expect from 1990s non-TV Doctor Who, the New Adventures in particular. The final scene is certainly one you'd expected to have read in 1993 or 1994, with the added bonus of sound effects to augment the grisliness. There are a lot of disturbing ideas here, although the story tends to tie itself in knots in part four, creating a bit too much confusion for its own good. Worse still, the writing actually draws attention to the problems. Characters and their motivations are out of kilter in the latter half, and there are some purely ridiculous moments that exist for plot expediency rather than logic, the glaring example being the Doctor locking Ace and the Bursar in the cellar.

Also present is the one problem Big Finish really should have ironed out by now: clunky explanatory dialogue. We have Hex talking to himself in the kitchen at the end of part one; likewise Ace in the attic in part two. But it's Andrew Forbes as O'Neill who gets the rawest of deals with lines like: "Could someone tell me why we're all here, dragged out of our beds at five in the morning?" and "He said it would be down here in the cellar"

All this needed was some tweaking. For example, maybe: "He said it would be in the cellar. We come down here to look, and what do you know, he's right!" (Not fantastic I know, but better than what we got!) Granted, it was originally scripted for television, but even if the writer hadn't the ear for transposing such lines to audio, the producer and/or director definitely should have. But this is not to say that the story is devoid of any sparkling lines. On the contrary, there are quite a few of them; the story of the dancing bear and "blood under the bridge" are exquisitely creepy and prescient, while O'Neill's "clockwork soldier" gag is pretty neat. (The Thora Hird quip is a bit too UK-centric though.)

The play is well performed by all the cast. Despite having the aforementioned awkward lines, Andrew Forbes is excellent, while one of my favourite Who guest actors, Bernard Kay, makes a memorable return after more than thirty years. The regular line-up of seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex is very strong too, in only their third outing.

All in all, Night Thoughts is enjoyable as long as it remains in the spirit of its genre; when it's about an apparently haunted house in a wintry setting, bumps in the night, murders and the like. It falls apart in the final episode, not necessarily losing the genre trappings but diluting them in layers of convolution and spoiling the fun. Anyhow, it's good to see an aborted television story given a second chance, even if the adaptation to audio has significant flaws. 6.5/10

Requiem for a Dream by Jacob Licklider 14/4/21

I'm a little bit glad that Night Thoughts wasn't ever included in the late McCoy era on television, not because it is a bad story, but because it is tonally similar and has a similar setting when compared to Ghost Light. It is this similar tone and setting that would most likely have caused viewers to overlook just how different these stories actually are. Where Ghost Light is a story about evolution and stopping change driven very much by its characters, Night Thoughts is a very different sort of character-driven story. It is a story of pride and how one man's pride can lead others to ruin. I am going to remain intentionally vague about this story's plot, as there are a very many twists and turns in this story that just deserve to be heard as you go along. Much like "And Then There Were None", every character has a deep, dark secret that they may be taking to their grave, and the murderer is trying to bring it out of them before they get torn down. The Doctor, Ace and Hex arrive on a remote Scottish island whose inhabitants in a mansion are performing time-travel experiments when of course the power goes out and a murderer starts killing people. That's all the plot is, as Ace and Hex start to unravel the mysteries of the house while the Doctor is the one who is in the background leading people on to the mysteries and trying to solve the problems with the time-travel experiments before anything bad could happen.

Let's take a minute to talk about the supporting characters of this story, starting with Sue, played by Lizzie Hopley, who is an orphan working in the house who is quite mentally disturbed. She wants to know where she came from but, due to a muddled psychosis can only process her emotions through her creepy toy rabbit, Happy, who constantly reminds her "Mother dead, Father gone, we think your sister's drowned," which is something that she cannot get away from. Sue has several moments of clarity, but when things go a bit sour, she reverts behind her toy rabbit and being plain creepy. Ace ends up becoming the only one who gets Sue to give up her darker secrets, as they both had bad relationships with their families. Of course, these secrets have to do with the main antagonist of the story: Major Dickens, played by Bernard Kay, is the epitome of a prideful bastard who only cares that his own good name gets spread and almost wants to bring everything down around him. Yet he still has more complexities, as he doesn't really want to see the people he is working with die, as, although he has bear traps spread around the mansion, he is aghast when he finds out Ace and Hex could have been trapped in them. He's still completely evil and does get his just deserts in the end, but he still has a well-developed character.

The other two characters in the supporting cast of this story of any real note are the Bursar, who is the woman who owns the mansion and is leading the experiments, and the Deacon, who allows the secrets of the past to cause her to become depressed. They both are a bit one-note, yet Edward Young writes the story in a way to make you care about almost all the characters, which I feel is mainly down to the setting of a remote island in the middle of nowhere. There really is this sense of hopelessness that permeates the area. You can almost feel the freezing rain falling on the island and the foggy danger in the distance. Sadly, this audio's biggest failing is that it tries to explain that the experiments worked, which, while it is a brilliant final scene, isn't necessary, as the ambiguity of whether the experiments worked and history was changed would be better. However, that just makes relistening to this story impossible, as you know exactly how it is going to end and any dramatic tension is lost.

To summarize, Night Thoughts is a lost classic that really should have been made in Season 27, with most of its actors on hand, and emulating the feelings of the Virgin New Adventures. Hex was integrated into the plot brilliantly, and Ace and the Doctor are both great, along with most of the supporting cast of the story. Young, however, has the problem of giving too much away at the end when he really should have just left it vague enough to have the possibility of it working, but going the other way. 80/100